Data Integration

Traditional approaches to the process of combining disparate data types into a cohesive, unified, organized view involve manual coding and scripting. The need for Real-Time Business Intelligence and the ability to leverage a wider variety of data sources is driving companies to embrace new ways to achieve Data Integration, including Data Virtualization, Master Data Management, and Integration Automation.

Data Integration Articles

RedPoint Global's two platforms, Interaction and Data Management, are now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, giving data-driven marketers access RedPoint's data and campaign management tools on the cloud for the first time. "We want to go into this cloud world with our software and we're changing the paradigm of the way people even buy software and the way they do their processing of their data," said Dale Renner, CEO and founder of RedPoint. "What we're doing is basically allowing our clients to very rapidly deploy solutions where they don't even have to buy all the software."

VoltDB has selected the Progress DataDirect OpenAccess SDK to increase access to business intelligence tools that allow VoltDB customers to visualize and access fast-moving data. To access data, users want to be able deploy conventional tooling and reporting tools, said John Piekos, vice president of engineering for VoltDB. "They want to do dashboards on top of this fast-moving data. We provide a JDBC interface but we also found we needed to provide ODBC access as well so we could leverage the last 30 years of ODBC reporting and BI tools."

GT Software has made enhancements to Ivory Service Architect, which provides application and data integration tools to simplify and accelerate access to business-critical, mainframe applications, data, and processes. "With the newest capabilities of Ivory Service Architect v5.0, organizations can more fully support mobile initiatives and address modern integration needs, getting the most out of their mainframe assets without writing additional code," said Adam Redd, CTO for GT Software.

IBM has introduced enterprise-class containers to make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments. Containers give developers the flexibility to build once and move applications without the need to rewrite or redeploy their code. Enterprises will now be able to use the combination of IBM, Docker, Cloud Foundry, and OpenStack to create a new generation of portable distributed applications.

It is still early days for Spark, and despite the promise it holds, companies are just now working through how best to use it, how to integrate it within their existing environments, and how to make the most of its libraries and other built-in capabilities. To provide more information and thought leadership on the open source framework, IBM, which recently announced a major commitment to Apache Spark, sponsored a DBTA webcast.

Dell is releasing a series of updates to its Toad family of database solutions that will continue to prioritize managing data across a variety of platforms. The latest round of updates to the Toad family of solutions enables customers to automate agile development practices, improve data preparation for analytics and reporting, and gain flexibility in selecting database platforms, according to Dell.

Oracle announced more than two dozen new PaaS and IaaS services spanning database, Java, integration, analytics, compute, storage, and networking services. "We are now prepared to call our platform and our infrastructure services complete," said Oracle executive chairman of the board and CTO Larry Ellison during the launch event. A key tenet of Oracle's cloud strategy, said Ellison is to offer the same technology on-premise and in the cloud "so you can easily move your data and applications back and forth."

The concept of shadow or stealth IT in organizations is not new, but it is a topic that is becoming more relevant. According to Gartner's IT Glossary, shadow IT "refers to IT devices, software and services outside the ownership or control of IT organizations." As IT professionals, what is our role in shadow IT? Is shadow IT good or bad for an organization?

By and large, it seems like today's IT professionals belong to one of two camps: either traditional on-premises IT or the cool, new age cloud. Sometimes, it can even seem like we are talking about two different species. After all, for many of us who come from the client-server era, cloud can be intimidating. Even worse, it can be a source of real anxiety; becoming obsolete is a constant risk in an industry that evolves as fast as ours.

As Agile development increases in popularity, companies have achieved faster time to market, reduced risk, and increased ability to manage changing priorities in their projects. However, what Agile means for the DBA team is more database deployments more often.

Liaison Technologies, a cloud-based integration and data management company, is incorporating MapR technology to offer a platform that will support versatile big data integration and management. "MapR has some very unique operational capabilities and a superior distributed data platform with MapR-FS and MapR-DB," said Brad Anderson, vice president of big data informatics at Liaison Technologies. "They give the ALLOY platform a significant technical advantage."

These days, everybody talks about big data and analytics but does anybody really know how to tackle it? Everybody thinks the others are doing it and hence also claim to do it as well, but it's likely that only the fortunate have had (positive) experience(s) with it so far.

Big data analytics company Datameer is releasing its first platform that will help enterprises and marketers directly and easily gain big data insights. The Datameer Multi-Channel Marketing Analytics platform is intended to allow organizations to integrate all their data from marketing and digital campaigns into one place to understand how the behavior of leads converts to customers.

NoSQL database company Couchbase is releasing an update to its mobile platform that will introduce preview support for ForestDB, bringing the Couchbase storage engine to mobile and promoting a new way of building mobile applications with or without an internet connection.

Attunity CloudBeam for Azure SQL Data Warehouse, a new cloud solution from Attunity, enables automated and optimized data loading from enterprise databases into the Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The new offering will simplify and accelerate data loading from enterprise databases, making it easier for customers to adopt the new Microsoft data warehouse service and benefit from big data analytics, according to Itamar Ankorion, executive vice president of business development and corporate strategy at Attunity.

If a data center fails, so could the business. It is hardly surprising then, to see the results of a recent survey which named the top management issue as availability. To allay this concern, and to meet customer expectations of an always-available data center, operators are deploying technologies that marry availability with optimized efficiency. Central to this outcome are database and software integrations.

Numerous studies over the past few years characterize generally poor performance in the success rate of business intelligence projects. Now is the time to move business intelligence practices into the 21st century, or risk a continued cycle of overspending and underperformance. Here are five new strategies to improve alignment between unique problem characteristics and specific strengths.

What matters most in data management in 2015? There are a lot of moving parts that data managers and professionals need to attend to in today's enterprises. Databases need to be wide open and accessible to all parts of the business, but at the same time, secure and free of tampering. Unstructured forms of data—such as log data, documents, graphics, video, and social data—need to be prepared and ready for analysis in the same way structured files have been ready for years.

Midstate Mutual Insurance Company provides property and casualty insurance in New York State, through insurance products that are sold exclusively through independent agencies located throughout upstate New York. To meet escalating information technology requirements and stay successful, Midstate, a longtime Revelation Software customer, has evolved to offer online access at any time, and from any device through separate, dedicated portals for agents and customers.

Pentaho is now offering support for integration with SAP HANA and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). Dubbed Pentaho 5.4, available now, the solution offers new capabilities that build on a pragmatic and future-proofed platform for big data orchestration and analytics at scale.

EMC, which enables businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service, is acquiring Virtustream to form its new managed cloud services business. The all-cash transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2015, subject to customary closing conditions, is valued at approximately $1.2 billion. Virtustream brings to the EMC portfolio a managed cloud software and services capability — whether on or off premise — which EMC also intends to incorporate into the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution.

Splice Machine has achieved certification on the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform, enabling faster query times and real-time updates. "Enterprises of all sizes are dealing with massive data sets on a daily basis, so there is a demand for a scalable, affordable database that can integrate seamlessly with a powerful unified analytics platform," said Monte Zweben, co-founder and CEO of Splice Machine.

SolarWinds, a provider of IT performance management software, is updating its virtualization suite, which provides troubleshooting and monitoring for Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere. "With Virtualization Manager version 6.3, we wanted to give administrators the ability to make remediation and to take action within the console," said Nikki Jennings, SolarWinds' group vice president of products and markets. "With the power of all this information we wanted administrators to see that there's a problem and take action."

Dataguise has rolled out DgSecure version 5.0, the latest generation of its DgSecure platform. The new release aims to enable businesses to scale sensitive data discovery, automate data protection, and achieve a comprehensive view of their sensitive data assets across the full spectrum of big data and traditional data repositories, both on-premise and in popular cloud platforms.

Syncsort is partnering with Dell and Cloudera to release a joint solution that will help enterprises reduce costs and improve business analytics. The partnership will create a Dell-Syncsort architecture that will combine Syncsort's Hadoop extract-transform-load tool, DMX-h, with Cloudera's Enterprise Data Hub, enabling customers to offload targeted ETL workloads and data from data warehouses to Cloudera's platform, increasing performance and freeing up valuable cycles in the EDW.

Announcing its fiscal 2015 Q4 results, Oracle said its business was significantly impacted by the strengthening of the U.S. dollar compared to foreign currencies. Oracle reported that total Q4 revenues were $10.7 billion, down 5% but would have been up 3% without the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.

IBM and Sogeti, a subsidiary of the Capgemini Group, are partnering to bring IBM's cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Bluemix, to developers and clients. As the largest deployment of Cloud Foundry in the world, Bluemix has the potential to help Sogeti build hybrid cloud applications across public, private and on-premises infrastructure faster with more streamlined integration.

ProfitBricks, an infrastructure-as-a-service provider, is offering an early preview of its new Docker hosting platform that enables users to build fully-portable applications within the ProfitBricks cloud. ProfitBricks' Docker provides developers and system administrators with a platform with dedicated resources that autoscales the Docker hosts. Early access customers will be able to utilize up to 2,500 CPU core hours as part of ProfitBricks' early access Docker preview.

Most company websites have approximately 70 different types of third-party code on their websites, but typically only know about one-third of them, according to Ghostery, a technology company that provides solutions for online transparency and control to individuals and businesses. To help Oracle Marketing Cloud customers identify hidden tags that can diminish not only website performance and customer experience, but data security and search engine optimization, Ghostery launched TrackerMap Live on the Oracle Marketing AppCloud.

Oracle Utilities has introduced Oracle Utilities Service Order Management, which it says is the industry's first commercially available service order automation solution designed to help utilities improve operational efficiency, accelerate issue resolution, reduce costs, and enhance customer service.

There's no doubt that the new wave of nonrelational systems represents an important and necessary revolution in database technology. But while we need to avoid being wedded to the technologies of the past and continuously innovate, ignoring the lessons of history is never a good idea.

SQL Sentry, a developer of software for SQL Server database professionals, has secured a $25 million growth equity investment from Mainsail Partners. The company plans to use the capital infusion to accelerate its product development, sales and marketing, and expand and enhance its client services.

As data and analytics become intertwined with business and society, Apache Spark brings essential advances to large-scale data processing by improving the performance of data dependent apps and simplifying the process of developing intelligent apps, which are fueled by data, according to IBM which is making a major commitment to the open source project.

ProfitBricks, a provider of cloud infrastructure IaaS, has launched an early preview of its new Docker hosting platform. "This is making us the most painless infrastructure available," said Achim Weiss, CEO at ProfitBricks. "We combine the flexibility of the platform with the ease of use of containers and still maintain a high level of security."

Attivio, which calls itself the data dexterity company, is releasing Attivio 5, the next generation of its software platform. This new solution aims to solve major issues for business intelligence by offering self-service data discovery acceleration capabilities. "We want to help companies get the data that they need to make decisions at scale and do it more comprehensibly through a self-service interface so they don't need to hire technical resources," said Stephen Baker, CEO of Attivio.

JethroData has closed an $8.1 million Series B financing round led by Square Peg Capital, and including existing investor Pitango Venture Capital. This funding round comes on the heels of the general availability of JethroData's SQL-on-Hadoop software, which uses indexes to query data up to 100 times faster than alternative SQL on Hadoop solutions.

Concurrent has announced general availability of Cascading 3.0, a platform for building and deploying enterprise applications on Hadoop. "This new, available version of Cascading will enable our users even further by simplifying application development, accelerating time to market and allowing enterprises to leverage existing, and more importantly, new and emerging data infrastructure and programming skills," said Chris Wensel, founder and CTO, Concurrent, Inc.

Kevin Kline, director of engineering services at SQL Sentry, Microsoft SQL Server MVP since 2004, founding board member of PASS, and DBTA columnist, is hitting the road this summer to reach cities across the country with large SQL Server user groups. The reason for the road trip is two-fold, said Kline.